The Roots of American Individualism: Political Myth in the Age of Jackson

By Alex Zakaras

A panoramic history of American individualism from its nineteenth-century origins to today’s bitterly divided politics

Individualism is a defining feature of American public life. Its influence is pervasive today, with liberals and conservatives alike promising to expand personal freedom and defend individual rights against unwanted intrusion, be it from big government, big corporations, or intolerant majorities. The Roots of American Individualism traces the origins of individualist ideas to the turbulent political controversies of the Jacksonian era (1820–1850) and explores their enduring influence on American politics and culture.

Alex Zakaras plunges readers into the spirited and rancorous political debates of Andrew Jackson’s America, drawing on the stump speeches, newspaper editorials, magazine articles, and sermons that captivated mass audiences and shaped partisan identities. He shows how these debates popularized three powerful myths that celebrated the young nation as an exceptional land of liberty: the myth of the independent proprietor, the myth of the rights-bearer, and the myth of the self-made man.

The Roots of American Individualism reveals how generations of politicians, pundits, and provocateurs have invoked these myths for competing political purposes. Time and again, the myths were used to determine who would enjoy equal rights and freedoms and who would not. They also conjured up heavily idealized, apolitical visions of social harmony and boundless opportunity, typically centered on the free market, that have distorted American political thought to this day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Oct 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9780691226309

Book preview

Cover: The Roots of American Individualism

THE ROOTS OF AMERICAN INDIVIDUALISM

The Roots of American Individualism

POLITICAL MYTH IN THE AGE OF JACKSON

ALEX ZAKARAS

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright © 2022 by Princeton University Press

Princeton University Press is committed to the protection of copyright and the intellectual property our authors entrust to us. Copyright promotes the progress and integrity of knowledge. Thank you for supporting free speech and the global exchange of ideas by purchasing an authorized edition of this book. If you wish to reproduce or distribute any part of it in any form, please obtain permission.

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [e-mail]

Published by Princeton University Press

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

99 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6JX

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-0-691-22631-6

ISBN (e-book): 978-0-691-22630-9

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Rob Tempio and Chloe Coy

Production Editorial: Jenny Wolkowicki

Jacket design: Karl Spurzem

Production: Erin Suydam

Publicity: James Schneider and Carmen Jimenez

Jacket image: Winslow Homer - Woodcutter 1891. Artefact / Alamy Stock Photo

For Tess

CONTENTS

Acknowledgmentsix

1 Introduction1

2 Foundational Myths12

PART I. THE INDEPENDENT PROPRIETOR 33

3 Republican Origins35

4 Jacksonian Independence54

5 Democracy81

PART II. THE RIGHTS-BEARER 105

6 Producers’ Rights109

7 The Free Market132

8 Rights against Slavery160

PART III. THE SELF-MADE MAN 199

9 Freedom in the Conservative Mind203

PART IV. AFTERMATH 241

10 Industrialization243

11 Conclusions268

Appendix: On the Meaning(s) of Individualism287

Notes295

Index399

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IN THE EIGHT YEARS it took me to write this book, I benefited immensely from the help and generosity of others. I had four terrific undergraduate research assistants, each of whom contributed valuable evidence and detail to the manuscript: Sophia Billias, Brendan Hersey, Carrie Madden, and Audrey Oliver.

My colleagues and my department at the University of Vermont have been consistently supportive and encouraging. I want to thank Bob Taylor and Patrick Neal in particular, who helped me think through all stages of this project and who read and commented on drafts of each and every chapter. Amani Whitfield offered me very helpful advice and feedback on many different parts of the manuscript. Melanie Gustafson gave me incisive comments on chapter 10 and pointed me toward relevant literatures.

I received funding from the University of Vermont’s Humanities Center, whose support in 2019–20 allowed me to make valuable progress on the manuscript in its later stages. I also benefited from a generous grant from the Louis Rakin Foundation, which enabled me to organize a manuscript workshop in 2019. I’m grateful to the Yale Department of Political Science and to Steven Smith in particular for hosting me during my sabbatical in 2013–14.

A number of scholars beyond UVM read part or all of the manuscript, and I learned a great deal from their comments and suggestions. I want to thank Joshua Lynn most of all for his sustained and detailed comments on the entire manuscript. Josh was exceptionally generous with his time—and his considerable expertise—over the last several years. Along with Amani and Josh, Harry Watson, Jason Frank, and Timothy Breen also participated in my manuscript workshop in the summer of 2019, and each gave me excellent feedback and advice—I am very grateful to all three. Many others have read and commented on chapters of the manuscript over the years, including Will Barndt, Eric Beerbohm, Josh Cherniss, Yiftah Elazar, Bryan Garsten, Lisa Gilson, Michael Lienesch, Luke Mayville, Susan McWilliams, Danilo Petranovich, Jim Read, Jeff Sklansky, Steven Smith, and Jack Turner.

I am deeply grateful to the librarians at the University of Vermont’s Howe Library, who provided substantial help and support throughout this project. I am especially indebted to Lisa Brooks and Sarah Paige, who tracked down countless obscure sources for me.

Special thanks, also, to Rob Tempio at Princeton University Press, who believed in this book and helped me bring it to fruition, and to the press’s anonymous reviewers, whose thoughtful comments helped me improve and reshape the book in important ways.

Portions of chapter 7 were previously published in Alex Zakaras, Nature, Religion, and the Market in Jacksonian Political Thought, Journal of the Early Republic 39, no. 1 (2019): 123–133, and appear courtesy of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and the University of Pennsylvania Press.

This book reflects the influence of a great many teachers who have influenced my thinking over the years and inspired my love for the history of ideas. In particular: Tom Goepel, Joel Greifinger, Pratap Mehta, Tyler Roberts, Louis Miller, Philip Fisher, Seyla Benhabib, Jonathan Allen, George Kateb, Stephen Macedo, Jeff Stout, Philip Pettit, Charles Taylor, and both my parents, who are gifted and passionate teachers in their own right.

Finally, I would be nowhere without the love and support of my family: my wife, Tess, and daughter, Charlotte, my parents, and my brother Michael. Every day, they remind me of what’s really important. They also contributed significantly to the book itself: Mom’s trained editorial eye helped me figure out the book’s structure and draw out its main storylines; countless conversations with Dad pushed me to sharpen and refine my ideas; Tess lovingly protected my research time, even through the pandemic’s stresses, and her astute questions and insights helped me improve the book in many ways.

1

Introduction

THE FREE INDIVIDUAL has long dominated the American political imagination. To this day, we often envision the sovereign individual standing proudly against an array of encroaching forces: big government, big corporations, intolerant majorities. In one leading version of this drama, these antagonists threaten our rights. They want to control our bodies or our sexuality, take away our guns, invade our property and our privacy, or push us to violate our conscience. Victory, in such struggles, is imagined as a defense of individual dignity and freedom against unwanted intrusion.

Another prominent variation pits individual merit and effort against unearned privilege. As a culture, we lionize the entrepreneur whose initiative and talent bring new value into the world and the modest self-starter who rises, through tireless effort, from poverty to the middle class. We celebrate these figures because of what they have individually accomplished, and we resent those who would lay claim to their hard-earned rewards. In the popular imagination, these claimants come in many guises: they include overzealous regulators imposing their own visions of the common good, wealthy oligarchs using political influence to absorb more than their rightful share, and the poor pressing collectively for state benefits. All are commonly presented as potential threats to the meritocratic order of American society, which is supposed to leave individuals free to make their own way.

We also imagine a perpetual social and political struggle against personal dependence. Our most treasured marker of independence is property: we celebrate home owners, small farmers, and small business owners—all masters of their own private domains—as archetypes of self-reliance. On the other hand, we are embarrassed by young adults who live with their parents, by welfare recipients, by unpaid debts, and by old age itself and the many forms of dependence it augurs. Our debates over social policy are often framed around encouraging people to stand on their own two feet.

These narratives are more prominent on the political right than the left, but their prevalence there has long tilted the balance of public opinion. Surveys have shown that unlike our counterparts in Europe, Americans would rather enjoy the freedom to pursue … life’s goals without interference from the state than see their government take an active role in society so as to guarantee that no one is in need. These political views are reinforced by a scaffolding of other, related convictions. Americans are far more likely, for example, to reject the view that personal success is determined by forces outside our control and to affirm that people can rise out of poverty on their own.¹ Many American Christians, meanwhile, believe the Bible teaches that God helps those who help themselves.² Such notions have broad ramifications for the shape of American public policy, from health care and social welfare to taxation to speech and gun rights. They contribute to a libertarian tilt that distinguishes the United States from most other affluent democracies.

Even the center-left bears their mark. Leading Democratic politicians often speak of boundless opportunities and unparalleled personal freedom as the birthrights of all Americans. They may warn that these opportunities have lately been imperiled by corporate greed, stagnant wages, and yawning inequalities. They may denounce the long-standing racism and patriarchy that have curtailed many Americans’ freedoms. But they, too, exalt the autonomous, upwardly mobile individual earning his or her place in a meritocratic society.

How and why did these tendencies rise to dominance in America? How and why, in other words, did so many Americans come to think in these terms about their politics and society? In addressing these questions, this book advances three main arguments. First, it shows that these ideas took hold in the Jacksonian Era (1820–50). Historians of political thought tend to see Jacksonian America as a fairly barren landscape, sandwiched between the epochal events of the founding and the Civil War. This book contends, instead, that it should be regarded as a seminal time—in some ways the seminal time—in forming the popular political narratives that continue to permeate our political life. Second, rather than treating American individualism as a single dogma or creed, this book presents it as a set of three overlapping myths, each containing its own idea of personal freedom and its own distinctive story of American exceptionalism. These myths have served as potent sources of shared meaning and identity, and their variety and flexibility help explain why they have appealed to so many different constituencies over time. Third, this book argues that American individualism harbors profoundly utopian aspirations that still influence our politics today. Historians have often described it as a fundamentally practical outlook, a preoccupation with moneymaking combined with a visceral intolerance of authority. In fact, the power of individualist rhetoric has derived, time and again, from long-standing utopian dreams embedded within. Let us consider each of these arguments in more detail.

The rise of individualism in Jacksonian America was precipitated by two great changes that convulsed Americans’ lives and reshaped the way they thought about their society and politics. One of these was the advent of mass democracy. In the decades following Thomas Jefferson’s election to the presidency in 1800, popular participation in state and federal elections rose dramatically and property qualifications for white male voters fell away. Modern political parties took shape, led by a new class of professional politicians, and rolled out campaigns designed to mobilize a mass electorate. As all white men came to feel entitled to a political voice, they shattered the deferential tone that had ruled American political life throughout the eighteenth century. Democracy, a term that had aroused suspicion among the nation’s founders, became their political watchword.³

These same years also brought transformative economic change, fostered by a combination of new technologies, ambitious infrastructure projects, cheap and expanding credit, and booming demand for domestic products and services. Their cumulative effect was to link America’s local and regional economies into an integrated system that reshaped the lives of millions of producers—both free and enslaved—who formed its backbone. In the North, small farmers produced surpluses designed for sale to distant markets and calibrated their decisions to the market’s price signals. They sold more goods for cash, which they could then use to buy the consumer products—from fabrics and hats to furniture and musical instruments—that flooded into the American inland on canal barges, steamboats, and rail cars. Their economic lives were less and less governed by the interpersonal bonds that had anchored local economies for generations, and increasingly structured by impersonal competition and contract. Americans were becoming aware that they belonged to an economic system whose impersonal laws and norms affected everyone, for good or ill.⁴ In the South, these same forces accelerated cotton production for the global market and intensified the domestic slave trade, forcing a million Black men, women, and children further west into the southern heartland.⁵

These transformations changed the way white Americans thought about themselves and their country: between 1820 and 1850, both democracy and the market were woven into the very idea of America. Increasingly, these were the institutions that Americans invoked to illustrate their society’s remarkable progress and to demonstrate its superiority. The United States, they argued, was the only democracy in the world, an egalitarian political beacon that others were destined to follow. It was also, they alleged, home to a uniquely free, dynamic, and meritocratic market economy in which people reaped the rewards of their own work without unwanted political interference. Together, these two generalizations underwrote the widely shared conviction that Americans enjoyed liberties unknown and even unimagined in other parts of the world.

These changes also shifted the way Americans understood their freedoms. In an affluent and fluid society exploding with opportunity for young whites, freedom was increasingly understood as a feature of private life: it was associated more and more with the individual’s control over his own work, his private enjoyment of rights against government, his ability to rise through the social ranks through effort and discipline. Many began to see the burgeoning market economy as freedom’s natural domain. Moreover, in a far-flung, decentralized society long suspicious of government control, democracy was often imagined as a way of curtailing the power of political elites while empowering ordinary people to defend their rights. Both were increasingly seen as means of shielding the sovereign individual from unwanted interference.

Although these individualistic tendencies originated much earlier, the Jacksonian Era saw them coalesce into a set of powerful political myths that would shape American political thought and rhetoric for generations to come. If the founding was the formative period for America’s constitutional structure, Jacksonian America—the so-called Era of the Common Man—was the crucible for American political myth.⁶ Beginning in the 1820s, a new class of political entrepreneurs successfully reformulated the founders’ patrician political ideas for a more democratic age; in doing so, they infused them with the free-market optimism that had only gradually penetrated American consciousness in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The vast expansion of print culture that brought cheap newspapers into so many American homes ensured that these new ideas circulated widely to a mass electorate.⁷

As this book traces the sources of these intellectual shifts, it focuses substantially on the Jacksonian Democrats. In recent decades, Andrew Jackson and his political party have fallen out of favor, and for good reason. They built American democracy on a foundation of racial hierarchy and Native American genocide. They weaponized white supremacy as a populist, political cause in ways that still infect our politics today. But their intellectual legacy does not end there: through their wide-ranging attitudes about the economy, the role of government, and the nature of democratic politics, they bequeathed a broad and varied set of political ideas. They were the period’s most successful conceptual innovators and political myth-makers, and this book therefore pays particular attention to the ways in which Jacksonian Democrats interpreted the political ideas of the founding generation and reformulated them for a mass electorate.⁸

The book’s second main argument is that American individualism has been expressed and transmitted, across nearly two hundred years, by three powerful political myths: the myth of the independent proprietor, the myth of the rights-bearer, and the myth of the self-made man. Each is best understood as an idealized story about what America is. Each assured its audience that America was, above all, an exceptional land of liberty, in which both people and institutions—and even the land itself—were uniquely suited for expansive personal freedom. Each offered a slightly different vision of both the free individual and the dangers that threatened to fetter him, and each drew on a different combination of intellectual traditions.⁹

Over the next ten chapters, we explore how each of these myths shaped American political debates and the ideas that animated them. The myths were not owned by any one side in the controversies that roiled Jacksonian politics—rather, they came to define a shared terrain on which anyone hoping for a broad audience was constrained to argue. They coursed through the political rhetoric of conservatives and reformers alike, and they even infused the self-consciously radical perspectives of abolitionists and early feminists. Their dominance ensured that all sides were competing to position themselves as the true defenders of individual liberty.

In discussing these myths, we pay particular attention to the themes of inclusion and exclusion. All three myths were variously used to fix the boundary between insiders and outsiders, between us and them. They defined a deeply felt sense of national identity and purpose, which set Americans apart, in their own eyes, from the Old World. They also shaped the content of both whiteness and masculinity: as historians have firmly established, individualist ideas were repeatedly used to construct archetypes of white male character and identity against which subordinate groups were defined and contrasted. White men insisted that women and people of color lacked the innate characteristics required to thrive as autonomous persons in a free society and a rugged, competitive economy. They were therefore destined for subordination—or, in the case of Native Americans, for extinction. In this way, paradoxically, individualist ideas underwrote an expansionist politics of white male supremacy, premised on innate group superiority, that was anything but individualistic.

At the same time, those pressing for greater inclusion turned to the same myths to challenge racial and gender hierarchies. Abolitionists and feminists decried what they saw as a caste society that awarded privileges to white men regardless of their individual merits or attributes. Feminists insisted that women were amply qualified for independent property ownership and entitled to live autonomous lives. Abolitionists, meanwhile, deployed an inclusive ideal of individual rights to highlight both America’s hypocrisy and its unrealized moral potential. Both mobilized America’s individualist myths to try to relocate the boundary between citizens and subordinates and promote a more inclusive vision of the American nation. In the ensuing chapters, then, we explore how American individualism has been harnessed to both expand and contract the boundaries of moral and political community.

Finally, this book argues that America’s individualistic myths have often conveyed a utopian vision of American society. All three have described America as the site of an emergent, harmonious order in which people are rewarded for hard work, self-discipline, and personal virtue. All three have also attributed this meritocratic order to God or nature. According to these myths, the United States is unique in escaping the profane and artificial hierarchies of the Old World. It is a nation in which autonomous individuals, directed by the hand of a benevolent God, produce their own fair and prosperous equilibria, so long as government lets them flourish unimpeded.

Although these utopian ideas have taken several different forms, they have found most consistent expression in the idea of the free market, which was widely popularized in the Jacksonian Era and which has deeply shaped the terms of American political debate ever since. For so many Americans, the inchoate sense that the market embodied a natural and providential order essentially removed it from the list of threats to human freedom. To suffer losses, defeats, or constraints because of the spontaneous agency of the market was a kind of misfortune, not a kind of oppression. On the other hand, to suffer setbacks at the hands of government regulators was to be deprived of liberty; it was a call to arms. This fundamental asymmetry, firmly grounded in utopian assumptions, has had profound implications for the trajectory of political ideas into the twentieth century and beyond.

There is nothing new, of course, in the suggestion that free-market ideology in America is laced with utopian dreams. This book helps us understand how these dreams were born and how they acquired such a hold on the American imagination. It helps us excavate the origins of the ideological patterns that still hold so many of us in thrall. It shows, among other things, how they were facilitated by important transformations in American political and religious thought in the first half of the nineteenth century.

It should be clear, by now, that this book does not strictly withhold judgment of its subject matter. While parts 1 through 3 are devoted to a careful exploration of individualist ideas in the Jacksonian Era, part 4 offers a critical evaluation of the period’s intellectual legacies. In so doing, it draws attention to both the pathologies and potentials of American individualism. The pathologies lie mostly in its exclusivity, its latent utopianism, and its nationalist triumphalism, all of which have helped rationalize or conceal exploitation and injustice. Its potentials, on the other hand, lie in the dissenting countercurrents that have opened paths for greater equality and inclusion.

In the mid-twentieth century, an influential group of historians argued that American political culture has been thoroughly individualistic since the Revolution, if not earlier. They argued, for example, that the Declaration of Independence and the catalog of rights enshrined in state and federal constitutions already placed the individual at the center of the political universe. They suggested that the framers’ unapologetic commercialism, reflected for example in the Federalist Papers and the thriving export economies of the eastern seaboard, foreshadowed the nation’s headlong embrace of competitive capitalism. They also pointed to several features of white male society in eighteenth-century America, including its wide-open economic opportunities, its cultural and religious fragmentation, and the relative absence of feudal or aristocratic institutions, as fertile ground for individualist assumptions. They maintained that American individualism—some preferred the term liberalism¹⁰—formed a fundamental consensus or creed that has defined and limited American political thought throughout the nation’s history.¹¹

Six decades of sustained scholarly criticism have exposed this argument’s shortcomings. In the 1960s, historians began challenging the consensus interpretation of American history by drawing attention to the powerful, anti-individualist narratives that still coursed through sermons, pamphlets, and speeches in late eighteenth-century America. They pointed, for example, to the ubiquitous Protestant drama of the sinful self whose unruly appetites and natural selfishness need constraining by the virtuous community. Or they highlighted an even older, neoclassical story that presents individual ambition and self-interest as the leading threats to a free and stable republic. Both of these commonplace variants featured a central struggle between the corrupt or anarchic individual and a harmonious social order overseen by both church and state. Some of these revisionist historians also emphasized the vast powers that state and local governments routinely claimed over Americans’ private lives well into the nineteenth century.¹²

In subsequent decades, intellectual historians broadened these criticisms by highlighting the diversity of American political ideas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries too. They showed, for example, how the Protestant politics of sin has continually shaped mainstream American politics. From the antebellum Temperance movement to the Reagan-era War on Drugs and mass incarceration, political movements seeking moral reform and control have used the American state(s) to invade private life and restrict individual liberty.¹³ Historians have also spent the last forty years unearthing the powerful white supremacist and patriarchal ideas that have both influenced and circumscribed American individualism throughout the country’s history. The systematic marginalization and oppression of women and people of color over the last two centuries reflect powerful and resiliently collectivist features of the national ethos. Each of these countertraditions—and others, including the social gospel that flourished in the late nineteenth century and helped shape the Progressive movement—has competed and intermingled with liberal individualism to create a far more complex and varied intellectual landscape than the midcentury historians allowed.¹⁴

This book does not attempt to resuscitate the consensus interpretation of American political or intellectual history. Rather, it suggests a different way of approaching the phenomenon that interested the consensus historians: the long-standing, preponderant influence of individualist ideas in American politics. It suggests that we approach this influence not by positing the existence of a timeless American creed but by studying three potent national myths that coalesced at a particular period in American history, that emerged gradually out of prior patterns of thought, and that shifted and adapted over time as they were appropriated by different political groups and applied to different policy controversies. It explores how these myths sometimes conflicted with one another, and how they interacted with—and sometimes infiltrated and intermingled with—the competing, anti-individualistic currents of thought that have also shaped American political culture since its inception. In pursuing this more modest strategy, it reaffirms some of the valuable insights of the midcentury historians without exaggerating their explanatory reach.

Several further clarifications are worth offering about what this book is not. It does not attempt a complete history of American political thought in the Jacksonian Era. It has little to say, for example, about the overtly aristocratic proslavery ideas that emanated from the deep South during this period; it does not explore the important constitutional debates over states’ rights and the limits of federal authority; nor does it study the political ideas of utopian socialists or Transcendentalists. These exclusions are not arbitrary or accidental. They are guided by two broad criteria: first, since this book’s subject is American individualism, its main goal is to explore those intellectual strains that have contributed directly to it. Second, with the exception of chapter 3, the ensuing chapters focus on popular currents of thought—that is, on political ideas that were widely shared. This is not a book mainly about intellectuals: the stories explored here are drawn largely from popular sources, including newspapers, public speeches, sermons, and magazines.¹⁵ They are also drawn, as much as possible, from representative sources: that is, from sources that either circulated widely or that reflected widespread ideological patterns. Since political parties were the dominant institutions shaping popular political ideas in the Jacksonian Era, they receive a great deal of attention throughout the book. Time and again, we look to partisan newspapers, election pamphlets, and political speeches to understand the dominant narratives that shaped the political outlooks of millions of voters, forged partisan identities, and brought citizens to the polls in record numbers.

The list of political myths explored in this book is not meant to be exhaustive. In fact, the three myths detailed here form part of a broader constellation of national myths that has shaped the American self-image across the centuries, including the democratic myth of Americans as a uniquely self-governing people, the Protestant myth of America as a community of saints dedicated to the moral and spiritual regeneration of humankind, and the ethnoracial myth of America as a white or Anglo-Saxon nation carrying the seeds of liberty in its ancestral heritage.¹⁶ This book maintains, however, that the individualist myths have occupied a dominant place in this constellation. Their dominance is evident not only in their ubiquitous appearance in American political rhetoric but also in the way they have influenced the content of these other, competing national stories. Over the course of the next ten chapters, we explore how individualistic ideas have shaped the prevailing conceptions of democracy (chapters 4 and 5) and race (chapters 4, 6, and 11), and how they have also suffused the idea of America as a Godly nation (chapters 7, 8, and 9).

Since this is a book about political myth, it is necessarily about idealization and misrepresentation. The individualist myths studied here have consistently described American society as a collection of autonomous and enterprising individuals making their own way in the world. In doing so, they have underemphasized the many forms of community that have in fact structured and enveloped so many American lives. They have sidelined families, kinship groups and ethnocultural identities, rich traditions of local and communal self-governance, as well as the churches, clans, unions, and fraternal groups to which Americans have consistently turned for fellowship, solidarity, and identity. In presenting stylized representations of the American nation and its politics, the myths have downplayed local diversity and variability.¹⁷ They have also continually deemphasized the role of state and federal governments in shaping American society and its economy. This book explores the powerful influence that these fictionalized narratives have exerted over American politics; it does not take them at face value.

Although political myth is the book’s main subject matter, it is not only about political myth. It is also about the intellectual traditions out of which America’s individualist myths were constructed. They were not invented out of whole cloth: popular political myths invariably borrow values, concepts, and narrative elements that already resonate widely among the national population. Over the course of the book, we explore how the three individualist myths absorbed ideas from a neoclassical republican tradition that circulated widely among transatlantic elites; from Protestant theology and its anti-authoritarian popularizations in the early nineteenth century; from the radical, egalitarian political culture that had long flourished among urban artisans in both England and its colonies; and from Scottish Enlightenment ideas that had reshaped the American view of God and human society alike. We trace the ways in which these and other diverse intellectual currents were combined and reworked into popular political narratives that were then deployed to shape public opinion and win elections. We pay close attention, in other words, to the intellectual contexts that allowed these particular myths to become popular and powerful.

This book does not present individualism as a uniquely American phenomenon. Comparable patterns of ideas can be found in Australian and Canadian political culture, for example (although they are somewhat less prominent there). Moreover, the ensuing chapters detail how American individualism has been shaped by transnational currents of thought, including British economic ideas, which were simplified, sacralized, and repurposed for the American electorate during the Jacksonian Era. While this book does highlight the differences between American and European political cultures in the nineteenth century, and while it explores the particularity of American individualism in some detail, nowhere does it suggest that the United States is somehow categorically distinct from other human societies.

Finally, this book is about ideas, and as such it offers only partial explanations of American political history and development. While it does assume that ideas exert some independent influence on political behavior, it certainly does not assume that they determine behavior. In fact, as the following chapters repeatedly suggest, ideas are influenced by—and interact with—a host of other factors, including geography and demography, economic and technological forces, the dynamics of class and party formation, and other cultural and political institutions. Together, these factors shape political behavior and, subsequently, the course of political history.¹⁸ It follows that the content of American political ideas, and the myths in which they are encoded, tells only part of the story of why American politics developed the way it has.

2

Foundational Myths

There is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources. Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things.

—ALASDAIR MACINTYRE¹

THE TERM MYTH is often used to connote falsehood. To describe a political claim or story as a myth, in this sense, is to mark it as untrue or fabricated. In this book, myth has a different meaning: broadly speaking, a political myth is a widely accepted story that is used to make sense of political events and experiences.² Such myths can be true or false; they typically weave together elements of both. They are defined above all by the function they serve: they offer simple storylines that reduce the chaos and complexity of political life to familiar patterns. They do this, typically, by staging moral dramas and projecting them onto political and historical events.³ Although their explicit subject matter may lie in the distant past, political myths remain myths only so long as they give meaning to the present.⁴

In the modern world, the most powerful political myths are those that describe the origins and character of the nation itself, or foundational myths. Foundational myths construct a glorified image of a national people and present it as a worthy object of devotion and sacrifice. They tell a story of national origins that illustrates its people’s basic values or character traits. These include economic and religious virtues, political values, imagined ethnic or racial traits, idealized cultural attributes, and more. Such qualities are typically highlighted through a contrast with some threatening other—some antagonist or rival, or some source of pollution or decay against which struggle was and is necessary. Because such struggle requires leadership, foundational myths also tend to offer an account of political authority; that is, they explain who speaks for the nation collectively, who its natural or appropriate leaders are.⁵

Such myths answer to a range of political and psychological needs. Politically, they serve as centripetal forces holding the national community together under an established institutional order. As Western nation-states consolidated in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they faced the immense political challenge of creating new forms of collective identity, of fusing often diverse and far-flung groups with competing cultural, ethnic, and religious attachments into a cohesive national people. They also faced the ongoing challenge of holding this people together through the economic turbulence and growing inequality of the industrial age. Foundational myths helped weaken these sources of conflict and fracture by subsuming potentially disruptive forms of group identity—including class and religious identity—into a unified national solidarity. In doing so, they also encouraged the habits of compliance and cooperation required by all stable nation-states.⁶ They were deployed, first of all, by the political and economic elites who aspired to unify and govern these emerging political communities.

Foundational myths derive their power and resilience, however, from another source: they also answer to deeply felt psychological needs, notably the need to live in a meaningful world.⁷ The modern state and the economy it regulates exert tremendous, structuring power over individual lives, yet their inner workings can seem mysterious and arbitrary. Like the cosmos itself, they often appear indifferent to the rhythms and travails of ordinary life. Myths help dispel this indifference. They not only render the political world intelligible, they also present it as an unfolding drama, with clear moral stakes, in which their believers are called to play a role. Political myths orient people, in other words, in a field of friends and enemies, heroes and villains, and invite them to take action in pursuit of imagined triumphs. Like sacred myths, they help human beings feel at home in the world.⁸

Myth could not possibly serve these functions without shaping political thought and belief.⁹ In conjuring up a people with a certain imagined history and character, foundational myths explain which political commitments belong to them and which are alien. In doing so, they make believers receptive to certain kinds of political argument while skeptical of others. Even more fundamentally, these myths shape the way their adherents perceive the landscape of politics itself. In dramatizing the national people’s epic struggle with antagonistic peoples or forces, foundational myths define the dominant storylines that help people make sense of both triumphs and setbacks. They bring certain actors to the fore even as they conceal or ignore others. In these ways, they structure a nation’s political consciousness and render themselves relatively impervious to rational argument.

Land of Liberty: Myth-Making in the Early Republic

The need for a set of unifying myths was urgently felt in the young American republic. In the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War, political elites struggled to articulate the terms of a shared American nationality. They were well aware of the obstacles they faced: until recently, Americans had proudly identified as British subjects, inheritors of a unique slate of English liberties; they were also divided by state and regional loyalties that were often stronger than their allegiance to the nation.¹⁰ In many places, moreover, the population was a patchwork of immigrant groups separated by cultural, religious, and ethnic differences.¹¹ For these reasons and others, the Constitution’s framers had worried that interstate conflict and other centrifugal pressures might yet rip the United States apart. Famously, the Constitution’s opening words—We the people of the United States—reflected a self-conscious attempt to construct or imagine a unified national public and relocate sovereign authority in its will, rather than in the separate states. The framers were struggling to tell a cohesive story of national unity, and this struggle only intensified in the ensuing decades, as national elites tried to defuse the recurrent sectional crises that threatened to permanently divide North from South.¹²

The dominant myths they deployed to meet these challenges told a story of liberation and rebirth. In countless Fourth of July orations, sermons, newspaper editorials, and campaign speeches, Americans were told that their nation was born out of an epochal struggle for liberty. It was much larger than a battle between the British crown and its restive colonies; it was a struggle between the Old World and the New. The Old World stood for oppression and hierarchy, which arose out of long-standing corruption and decadence. Its once-promising ideals had grown frail and tarnished through centuries of misrule. The New World, on the other hand, held out a once-in-history opportunity for Western civilization to shed its accumulated infirmities, to rise again in the strength and purity of its youth, and to set out on a new, free trajectory.

This narrative of rebirth appeared in several different forms, as the restoration of a truer Christianity, of a long-lost Saxon freedom, or of the republican ideals of Greek and Roman antiquity. It was almost always clothed in religious significance: the West had squandered its God-given opportunity to realize freedom on earth, and the New World was its (only) second chance. It was here, in America, that human freedom would either reach its zenith or wither and die. We cannot admit the thought, that this country is to be only a repetition of the old world, wrote William Ellery Channing, a leading Unitarian preacher and theologian, in 1830. We delight to believe that God, in the fulness of time, has brought a new continent to light, in order that the human mind should move here with a new freedom, should frame new social institutions, should explore new paths, and reap new harvests.¹³ His view was typical: over and over, Americans celebrated their country as the land of the free, the refuge for the oppressed, the place where people could—at long last—lay claim to the liberties that were their natural birthright.¹⁴ Over and over, they presented it as an exceptional nation, not just different than any other place on earth but destined to lead or redeem humankind.

If governing elites often deployed this mythology for their own purposes, however, it also escaped their control.¹⁵ In the wide-open, decentralized media environment of the early American republic, a broad range of dissenting politicians, factions, and movements laid claim to it for themselves. These included workingmen’s advocates condemning wage labor as a violation of American freedom; Anti-Masons assailing Freemasonry as a secretive, aristocratic cabal that stood deeply at odds with America’s republican principles; free-soil activists decrying the expanding reach of slavery in national politics; and evangelical reformers lamenting drunkenness, Sabbath-breaking, and unrepentant materialism as fundamental threats to free society. All accused governing elites of endangering or betraying America’s exceptional freedom; all positioned themselves as its natural defenders. In the most radical instances—in certain abolitionist circles, for example—America’s foundational myths were inverted and thrown back against the American Constitution itself as challenges to its very legitimacy.¹⁶

These foundational myths are best understood, therefore, as offering a shared grammar of political argument and counterargument, a reservoir of key values, symbols, and imagery that anyone bidding for power and influence had to harness. They supplied the key symbolic and narrative tools that could, if skillfully wielded, reshape public opinion and mobilize the electorate. And yet their versatility was not limitless. Even as they generated diverse and contested interpretations, they also constrained the range of plausible alternatives. They provided avenues for challenge to the status quo and at the same time limited the range of political goals and strategies that reformers could embrace without alienating their political audiences.¹⁷

Three Visions of Individual Freedom

Three foundational myths were especially prominent in the political rhetoric of Jacksonian America. Each offered a variation of the narrative of liberation and rebirth, premised on a sharp contrast with the Old World. Each featured its own mythic hero: the independent proprietor, the rights-bearer, and the self-made man. These three figures, endlessly acclaimed in Jacksonian political life and letters, displayed three subtly different visions of the free individual and three corresponding, idealized portraits of the American nation and its people.¹⁸

THE INDEPENDENT PROPRIETOR. The first myth described white American society as the province of independent men who controlled their own livelihoods: they owned the land they cultivated or the small business they operated. They did not depend on the patronage or good favor of some powerful landlord or master. They were their own men, and in this sense they were free. The Old World, by contrast, was seen as a site of dependence, exemplified by the feudal serf who worked at his lord’s discretion or the desperate factory worker toiling under his boss’s thumb, without any meaningful control over his own labor. Such economic subservience was widely described, in Jacksonian America, as a form of slavery.

In the dominant, agrarian version of this myth, it was land that set America apart from Europe: with its vast western wilderness promising a nearly endless supply of fertile soil to cultivate, the American continent could house millions of small farmers and nourish the distinctive political values that came naturally to them.¹⁹ It told the story of so many European immigrants who were reborn in America when they took possession of their own farms. Freed from dependence, they could speak their own mind and think for themselves. They could embrace a natural skepticism of authority. They could also gather as social equals to deliberate about public affairs. In all of these ways, they were well suited for democracy: it was because they were independent, many Americans believed, that they were capable of self-government.

THE RIGHTS-BEARER. The second myth imagined that Americans were united by a shared desire to secure their natural rights against political oppression. It told of a land originally peopled by exiles fleeing religious persecution, who came to America to live, work, and worship in peace. Their most iconic rights, therefore, were the rights of religious conscience and association, though these were joined by many others, including rights to free expression, property ownership, and fair legal procedures. Like the first myth, this one was fundamentally about freedom: it told the story of a long-awaited human emancipation from bondage.²⁰ What distinguished Americans, as a people, from the rest of the world was their ardent and uncompromising devotion to liberty, which had been transmitted through the generations, from the earliest Puritan exiles. But the ideal of liberty presented here was slightly different: it was freedom from political and ecclesiastical oppression, not mainly from economic dependence.

Like the first myth, this one too derived much of its power from a sharp contrast between the New World and the Old. It described human history as a nearly unbroken litany of political oppressions: except for a few brilliant but ephemeral exceptions, human beings had always stood at the mercy of their rulers, who could use up and destroy their lives at their pleasure. America alone, it claimed, had broken this long-standing pattern. The American founders, distilling the libertarian folkways of colonial life, had installed individual rights as the highest purpose of government. The myth of the rights-bearer held up the Declaration of Independence, with its assertion that governments were created to secure certain self-evident rights, as a decisive affirmation of this new reality. So long as Americans remained true to their defining convictions, then, their government could remain something new under the sun: a mere tool in service of the sovereign individual, a guarantor and enforcer of his natural freedoms.

THE SELF-MADE MAN. The third myth imagined America as a pure meritocracy. Like the other two, it began with a vivid contrast: whereas all other societies were marked by sharp caste hierarchies that defined, from birth, who and what every individual could be, no such hierarchies existed in America—certainly not for white men. Instead, the myth taught that American society was fluid and classless, and everyone had to earn their place in it through personal effort and achievement. In the United States, hard work, ingenuity, and perseverance were rewarded, while laziness, indiscipline, and wastefulness were punished. Those who failed to get ahead therefore had no one but themselves to blame. On the other hand, those who succeeded earned that special, highly individualized form of esteem owed to the person who makes his own luck.

This myth was partly about justice: it imagined America as a uniquely just society, for it gave individuals what they deserved, no more and no less. But it was also, of course, about the individual’s freedom to be who he wanted to be, to leave his humble beginnings behind and make something of himself. It told of a land settled by enterprising migrants eager for an opportunity to make their own way in the world, to leave behind the strict social and economic limits of the Old World and rise as far as their effort and talent would take them. In the figure of the self-made man, then, this myth offered a third vision of individual freedom: the freedom to fashion one’s own life and identity, to be the architect of one’s own fortunes.²¹

These three mythic figures were never wholly separate. The small proprietor owed his independence partly to property rights, which secured his dominion over his own private patch of earth; he was therefore simultaneously a rights-bearer. Property ownership, meanwhile, was celebrated as a path to social mobility: cheap land in the West, especially, was thought to provide pathways to the middle class for so many poor white immigrants and wage workers. In this sense, the mythic small proprietor was also a self-made man, rising to respectability through hard work, initiative, and courage. The rights-bearer and the self-made man converged, too: rights were often held up as shields that prevented governments or economic elites from foreclosing the opportunities that would allow ordinary people to shape their own lives. Finally, all three mythic protagonists were almost always imagined to be white Protestant men, and all three of these ideals of freedom were routinely understood to be the prerogatives of this privileged group.

These three myths are best understood, therefore, as offering three different versions of the sovereign individual who dominated the American imagination during the Jacksonian Era. Each myth foregrounded different aspects of his character and circumstances. Together, they lent the ideal of American freedom a richness and flexibility that helped make it truly ubiquitous in the period’s political rhetoric. As political leaders, editors, and activists tried to align themselves with the cause of liberty, they constantly invoked one or more of the myths. They argued, for example, that predatory bankers and land speculators were victimizing small farmers and destroying their dream of independent proprietorship. They argued that tariffs, in driving up prices and unfairly subsidizing industrialists, were violating the natural or God-given rights of so many farmers and consumers. They argued that slavery was teaching white Americans to despise manual labor, and so short-circuiting the incentives to work hard and get ahead that encouraged self-made men. In these contexts and so many more, they labored to position themselves as champions of America’s exceptional freedom and show that their opponents were betraying it. They channeled the myths, and the myths shaped the content of their political appeals.

Specifically, these three foundational myths framed political debates in sharply individualistic terms. They did so, first, by asserting the moral and political priority of relatively private conceptions of individual freedom. Each located freedom largely within the domain of private choice, ownership, and control, and each uncoupled it from stringent civic or social obligations. Throughout eighteenth-century America, the idea of freedom had carried many competing connotations and meanings.²² Some of them had linked freedom closely to an ideal of collective self-government that depended on citizens’ willingness to be active and self-sacrificing members of the body politic. In the foundational myths that circulated through Jacksonian America, however, these civic connotations had moved into the background. This key shift, which we will explore over the course of the book, coincided with the rise of market society and the popular new economic ideas that accompanied it. As the economic connotations of freedom grew more prominent, the idea of freedom itself was steadily privatized.²³

Second, all three myths imagined white society as a collection of free and equal individuals, each in control of his own fate. As a number of European observers noticed, Americans tended to imagine not just their government but also their society itself as an association of individuals drawn together by common interests and values and united by contractual agreements. Whereas Europeans generally saw their societies as groupings of social ranks or classes bound together in traditional patterns of mutual dependence and obligation, Americans saw things differently.²⁴ In fact, white Americans in the Jacksonian Era often described the uniqueness of their own society in exactly these terms: in America, they declared, individuals stood apart from inherited group identity or status; they were their own selves, free to go their own way. The idea of America as a nation of immigrants, who chose to emigrate here and to submit themselves to its authority, only reinforced this narrative: in America, the people itself, and not just the constitution or government, could be imagined as an artifact of consent.

One of the inferences that seemed to follow naturally from this conception of American society was that individuals were responsible for who and what they became—or failed to become. In the Old World, individuals were acted on; their lives were shaped by deeply entrenched patterns of hierarchy, oppression, and exploitation. In America, where no such obstacles were presumed to exist, individuals were the actors. Each would chart his own course through the world. Much more than their European counterparts, observed French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, Americans commonly believed that their fate lies entirely in their own hands.²⁵ Although this idea found clearest expression in the myth of the self-made man, it was amply evident in the other myths, too. Both the independent proprietor and the rights-bearer were defined, above all, by their expansive freedom to make their own choices, define their own commitments, follow their own consciences.

This, then, is what individualism means in this book: the idea that America is and ought to be (a) a polity devoted to the expansion of private liberty and (b) a meritocratic society in which individuals are responsible for their own fates.²⁶ One of the distinctive features of American individualism, so understood, is that it has functioned simultaneously as a moral ideal and a description of American society. As we explore in the coming chapters, Americans—especially the white men who have dominated the country’s political discourse—have tended to believe that their individualistic values are already (mostly) realized in America. Time and again, they have framed their political conflicts around the need to protect these values from corruption or external threat.

Inclusive and Exclusive Individualism

In the politics of Jacksonian America, all three myths combined egalitarian principles with sharply hierarchical assumptions. As historians have often pointed out, their explicit language was often universal rather than parochial: rather than emphasizing shared ethnicity, language, cultural traditions, or even a particular homeland, these myths commonly celebrated shared opportunities and ideals. Moreover, many politicians and journalists presented these ideals not as the exclusive inheritance of a particular culture or people but as universal principles whose spread epitomized the moral and material progress of the human race.²⁷

The apparent inclusiveness of the myths arose, most of all, from their treatment of social class. As we have seen, Americans often defined themselves against Europe; and in the American mind, nothing represented the Old World so much as rigid class hierarchy.²⁸ In its own way, each of the three foundational myths announced that such hierarchy was alien to American life. Personal independence, for example, was imagined to be open to any white man who came to own property.²⁹ From colonial times onward, Americans also firmly believed that even the poorest European immigrant could, through hard work and frugal self-discipline, accumulate wealth and ascend into the property-owning middle class. Meanwhile, the idea of natural rights was commonly understood as a repudiation of the aristocratic and authoritarian pretensions of European elites (and their American imitators). It affirmed that rich and poor alike were entitled to the same legal and political consideration. When Americans reached—as they so often did—for universal language to describe their national way of life, they often meant just this: American opportunities and ideals were available to white men of all social classes, no matter how humble their beginnings.

When our focus shifts from class to other forms of hierarchy, however, America’s individualist myths look far less inclusive. In fact, American national identity has always carried strong ethnoracial, gendered, and religious overtones that excluded many groups from its supposedly universal promise. Throughout the Jacksonian period, Native Americans were cheated, dehumanized, and killed to make room for expanding white society. Irish Catholic immigrants were denigrated and denied economic opportunities. Women were held in legal and economic subjection and denied a political voice. Moreover, the prosperity and the very identity of white America was propped up by the forced labor of millions of Black slaves. Time and again, European observers were struck by this fundamental hypocrisy of American life: here was a society that ardently and continually affirmed a broad set of egalitarian ideals and